In recent years, advances in computer technology have fueled an explosive growth in digital electronic games. The latest digital electronic games combine three dimensional (3D) graphics with special effects sounds to make playing the games a realistic experience for the players. Advances in computer technology have also allowed the proliferation of inter-networks notably the Internet.
Given the amount of information on the Internet as well as the speed and costs of using the Internet, it is not surprising that the Internet is widely used as a research tool as well as for general business purposes such as advertising and commercial transactions. Another use of the Internet that is currently gaining popularity is digital electronic game playing.
In using the Internet for digital electronic game playing, players from distant geographical locations, who have computers equipped for digital electronic game playing, can share in a single game. Because of the populace that are connected to the Internet, the pool of able and willing players for a game is greatly increased. On the other hand, the very vastness of the Internet makes performing such a search a significant challenge. More importantly, the poor quality of the data communications links between the computers of the players can cause undesirable effects such as lagging wherein the response time of a player is slow due to latency, connection quality, etc. Such communications problems can make players frustrated and can therefore greatly diminish the joy and pleasure of playing a digital electronic game.
Efforts have been made in the Prior Art to overcome some of the above shortcomings. To overcome the difficulty of finding able and willing players for a game, some Prior Art commercial game systems, with the help of a liaison computer, allow players to exchange messages, organize themselves into groups based on their ability level, and schedule games based on the information gathered. In some cases, the liaison computer serves as a game coordinator to get the appropriate players together for a game.
On the other hand, to improve the quality of the communications links between the players' computers, one Prior Art commercial game system requires specially designed modems to establish point-to-point telephone links with low latency between players. This method may be non-optimal because it requires the player to have specially designed modems which significantly narrows the pool of candidate players.
Another Prior Art commercial game system uses servers, computers that are connected to the Internet by permanent links having high bandwidth and low latency, the server computers act as a liaison between the players both before and during game play. Generally, client home computers are connected to the Internet by temporary links (e.g., using the ordinary telephone system). In this commercial game system, a measurement is performed by the player computer executing a software program on the player computer. In general, latency measurement is a measurement of a typical message's transit time between two Internet nodes. Accordingly, a lower latency measurement translates to a higher quality of the link. An assumption here is that if each of the players has a good connection to the server, then the players will have a good connection to each other. If the players determine that the quality of the links is sufficient for the game at hand, the game begins.
In yet another Prior Art, each player (also known as client computer) determines the quality of the communications link to all the servers in terms of latency measurement and/or other criteria such as bandwidth and error rates. The quality measurements are then provided to a predetermined server which is designated as a matchmaker to select a game server to act as the game liaison for the players based on latency measurement and other predetermined criteria. The function of the game server depends on whether the game is a peer-to-peer game or a client-server game, and other factors.
In the Prior Art, having the player computers make quality measurements is an added burden that may slow down the operation speed of the player computers. One reason is that data communication links between player computers and the server/matchmaker are transitory links that typically use the ordinary telephone system for connection to the server/matchmaker. In general, transitory links are slow in transit times, have low modulation rates, have low data throughput rates, are error prone, and are not entirely reliable. As such, each of the player computers needs to perform the quality measurements every time it wants to start a game to ensure of that the quality needed is met. Because it is prudent to perform the quality measurements at regular intervals up until just before game time and because each latency measurement may take several seconds to make, the total amount of overhead required in ensuring the quality of the data communications link may indeed become a significant overhead to make prospective players impatient.
Furthermore, given the error prone and unreliable nature of the transitory links between player computers and servers, it is possible that when the quality measurements results are sent from the player computers to the server/matchmaker, the information may be lost thereby requiring a retransmission and consequent delay. Such inconveniences mentioned above are reasons as to why the Prior Art may be non-optimal.
Thus, a need exists for a more effective and more efficient technique to ensure that the quality of the data communications links employed are well adapted for digital electronic game playing.